Hi Mark:

I had installed Visual Studio 2002 and later installed the beta of Visual Studio 2003 Beta. I generally prefer to uninstall all remnants of beta software before reinstalling released versions to prevent some bug creeping in from an old file so I went to the Add/Remove programs and selected to remove Visual Studio 2003 beta. Once complete, Visual Studio 2002 would not work as portions were apparently removed/overwritten when I uninstalled the newer beta version. I think I installed both products (though) to their respective default directories but there must be some reliance on one another (likely to save disk space).

What I did to make sure I was working with the preferred version, I 'bit the bullet' and took the time to uninstall the initial version, associated tools, .NET Framework 1.0 etc. and freshly installed Visual Studio 2003 with the Full Install of the help file. This way I felt that I had the freshest build available of all files which would not leave any doubt when debugging later on that my current problem was due to a file conflict when actually the problem was from my own work (wasn't this thinking supposed to disappear with .NET...hard to learn confidence I guess).